The dog, which was a family pet, will be destroyed. No details about the dog's breed have been revealed."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Commentary
A very odd choice of words....
Usually it's objects, not living things, which are "destroyed".
I wish the best for the toddler and hope that they recover swiftly.
Mr Hu spoke at a joint news conference on the first full day of his state visit to the US
Chinese President Hu Jintao has acknowledged that "a lot still needs to be done" in China over human rights.
Mr Hu was speaking at a rare joint news conference with US President Barack Obama on the first full day of his state visit to the US.
Asked to justify China's human rights record, Mr Hu said China had "made enormous progress recognized in the world".
Mr Obama said he saw China's "peaceful rise" as good for the United States.
"The US has an interest in seeing hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty," Mr Obama said.
Mr Hu has arrived at the White House for a star-studded state dinner, and was ushered into the building by Mr Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.
The opulent affair came following a long day of meetings and a press conference, at which the US president hailed relations with China and said the two countries had a huge stake in each other's success.
At a White House ceremony in the morning to greet Mr Hu, Mr Obama said the US and China would be more prosperous and secure when they worked together.
Mr Hu said co-operation should be based on mutual respect, and they should respect each other's development paths.
The two leaders' talks at the White House tackled issues from currency and trade to defence and security.
US officials revealed that a $45bn (£28bn) export deal had been signed with China, including Beijing's $19bn purchase of 200 Boeing aircraft.
Mr Obama said the deals would help create more than 200,000 jobs in the US.
'Source of tension'
President Barack Obama: ''I have been very candid with President Hu''
Mr Obama admitted that differences on human rights issues were "occasionally a source of tension" between the US and China.
"I believe part of justice and part of human rights is people being able to make a living and having enough to eat and having shelter and having electricity," he said.
"We welcome China's rights.
"We just want to make sure that [its] rise occurs in a way that reinforces international norms, international rules, and enhances security and peace as opposed to it being a source of conflict either in the region or around the world."
End Quote Barack Obama US presidentWe have an enormous stake in each other's success - we will be more prosperous and more secure when we work together”
Mr Obama said that although the two nations may demonstrate differences when it comes to these issues, it does not prevent them from co-operating in other "crucial areas".
Mr Hu said China was willing to continue a conversation about human rights on the basis of mutual respect and non-interference in China's internal affairs.
"China is a developing country with a huge population and also a developing country in a crucial stage of reform," the Chinese president and Communist Party leader said.
Mr Hu added that China "faces many challenges in social and economic development. A lot still needs to be done in China on human rights."
Mr Hu at one point did not respond to an American reporter's question about human rights issues, saying later that difficulties in translation and technical equipment caused the error.
Mr Obama said earlier on Wednesday that Mr Hu's trip to the US was the basis for the next 30 years of ties between the two nations.
The two presidents promised to co-operate in their dispute over China's currency, the yuan, which the US says is kept artificially low to help Chinese exporters.
Mr Obama said the yuan's value must be driven by the market, and that there needed to be a level playing field in trade.
Continue reading the main story
Mr Obama said China was a top market for American exports, supporting nearly a half a million US jobs, adding that it was important for the two nations to co-operate while remaining competitive.
During the ceremony on Wednesday morning, Mr Obama cited President Jimmy Carter's meeting with Chinese leader Deng Xiao Ping in 1979 which normalised relations between the two countries, frozen for the previous 30 years.
The White House is laying out a full formal reception with lunch at the state department, a state dinner at the White House, and meetings with some of America's most powerful business leaders from firms like General Electric, Coca-cola and Boeing.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was a guest at the lunch and state dinner, told the BBC's Newsnight programme: "America has to live with the China that exists.
"Whether we have to be afraid of it or not, will depend on the politics that we both pursue."
The Chinese president's visit is likely to be Mr Hu's last state trip to the US before a handover of power is completed in China in 2013.
Later in the week, Mr Hu is expected to travel to Chicago, where some predict he will sign a series of trade and investment agreements.
The US is encouraging China to buy tens of billions of dollars of aircraft, car parts, agricultural goods and beef.
Trade between the US and China is worth $400bn, up from $100m 30 years ago, when the US last formalised relations with the communist state.
China also holds the world's largest foreign currency reserves at $2.85tn and a major share of US government debt.
The poetic "ask not" quotation is among the speech's most memorable lines President John F Kennedy would have been delighted to know that his inaugural address is still remembered and admired 50 years later.
Like other great communicators - including Winston Churchill before him and Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama since then - he was someone who took word-craft very seriously indeed.
He had delegated his aide Ted Sorensen to read all the previous presidential inaugurals, with the additional brief of trying to crack the code that had made Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address such a hit.
Fifty years on, the debate about whether he or Sorensen played the greater part in composing the speech matters less than the fact that it was a model example of how to make the most of the main rhetorical techniques and figures of speech that have been at the heart of all great speaking for more than 2,000 years. Most important among these are:
If the rhetorical structure of sentences is one set of building blocks in the language of public speaking, another involves simple "poetic" devices such as:
In general, the more use of these a speaker makes, the more applause they will get and the more likely it is that they will be recognised as a brilliant orator.
But great communicators differ as to which of these techniques they use most.
Presidents Reagan and Obama, for example, stand out as masters of anecdote and story-telling, which didn't feature at all in JFK's inaugural. Mr Obama also favours three-part lists, of which there were 29 in his 10-minute election victory speech in Chicago.
Stark warningKennedy, however, used very few in his inaugural address. For him, contrasts were the preferred weapon, coming as they did at a rate of about one every 39 seconds in this particular speech. Some were applauded and some have survived among the best-remembered lines.
He began with three consecutive contrasts:
From the 20 or so he used, other widely quoted contrasts, all of which were applauded, include:
The speech also bristled with imagery, starting with a stark warning about the way the world has changed because "man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life."
People of the developing world were "struggling to break the bonds of mass misery."
Ronald Reagan was a master of anecdote JFK vowed to "assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty" and that "this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house."
He sought to "begin anew the quest for peace before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity", hoped that "a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion" and issued a "call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle."
First inaugural designed for the media?Impressive though the rhetoric and imagery may have been, what really made the speech memorable was that it was the first inaugural address by a US president to follow the first rule of speech-preparation: analyse your audience - or, to be more precise at a time when mass access to television was in its infancy, analyse your audiences.
Lincoln's short Gettysburg address had caught JFK's eye. Here is a sample of the speech:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."
In the most famous fictional speech of all time, Mark Antony had shown sensitivity to his different audiences in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by asking his "Friends, Romans, countrymen" to lend him their ears. But Kennedy had many more audiences in mind than those who happened to be in Washington that day.
His countrymen certainly weren't left out, appearing as they did in the opening and towards the end with his most famous contrast of all: "Ask not..." But he knew, perhaps better than any previous US president, that local Americans were no longer the only audience that mattered. The age of a truly global mass media had dawned, which meant that what he said would be seen, heard or reported everywhere in the world.
At the height of the Cold War, Kennedy also had a foreign policy agenda that he wanted to be heard everywhere in the world. So the different segments of the speech were specifically targeted at a series of different audiences:
The following day, there was nothing on the front pages of two leading US newspapers, The New York Times and the Washington Post to suggest that the countrymen in his audience had been particularly impressed by the speech - neither of them referred to any of the lines above that have become so famous.
The fact that so much of the speech is still remembered around the world 50 years later is a measure of Kennedy's success in knowing exactly what he wanted to say, how best to say it and, perhaps most important of all, to whom he should say it.
